21
A NEW APPROACH TO THE
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
OF MELODY
.
Introduction
What is a musical melody? At the physical level, it is simply an organized succession of indi-
vidual tones. At the perceptual level, however, it is much more. One perceptually oriented
definition of melody has been suggested by the ethnomusicologist Simon Shaheen: a
melody is ‘a group of notes that are in love with each other’.^1 A related definition, which I
hope to illustrate in this chapter, is that a musical melody is a tone sequence in which the
individual tones are processed in terms of multiple structured relationships.aThis defini-
tion emphasizes the active role of the mind in melody perception. That is, a melody (like a
spoken sentence) depends on a listener’s perceptual system to convert a ‘mere sequence of
sounds’ into a meaningful mental experience.
This chapter has two goals. The first is to illustrate the cognitive richness of melody
perception. The second is to introduce a new method for the neural study of melody.
To illustrate melody perception I have chosen one particular melody from the Western
European tradition, a children’s song indexed as K0016 in the Essen database of Bohemian
folk melodies.2,3,bFigure 21.1 shows the melody in Western music notation and in ‘piano-roll’
notation with each tone’s pitch plotted as a function of time (this melody and all sound
examples in this chapter can be heard at http://www.nsi.edu/users/patel/sound_examples/
pz_chapter). The reasons for choosing this melody are threefold. First, it is historically
recent yet likely to be unfamiliar to readers of this chapter: thus it follows familiar musical
conventions while being free of specific memory associations. Second, as a folksong this
melody has been through a period of preservation and transmission by ear rather than by
music notation, so that it has survived a certain amount of natural testing for its percep-
tual coherence. Third, as a children’s song the melody is short and illustrates basic struc-
tural relations in relatively simple form. Beyond these constraints, there is nothing special
about K0016, and any number of melodies would have served the same purpose.
aThroughout this chapter the term ‘melody’ refers to monophonic melody, that is, melody without
accompaniment.
bThe database is available from the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (Stanford
University) and at http://www.esac-data.org (K0016 is in the kinder0 file of this database).